Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [57]
Lecturing herself didn't do any good. She knew he was perfectly awful and he'd used her abominably and he was incapable of affection and he was wedding her mainly for revenge…and she wanted him to want only her, all the same.
"Have I finally shocked you?" Dain asked. "Or are you merely sulking? The silence has become deafening."
"I am shocked," she said tartly. "It would never occur to me that you would mind being watched. You seem to delight in public scenes."
"Beaumont was watching through a peephole," Dain said. "In the first place, I can't abide sneaks. In the second, I paid for a whore— not to perform, gratis, for an audience. Third, there are certain activities I prefer to conduct in private."
The carriage drive at this point began to veer northward, away from the banks of the Serpentine. The horses struggled to continue along the riverbank, aiming at a stand of trees. Dain smoothly corrected their direction without appearing to take any notice of what he was doing.
"At any rate, I felt obliged to clarify my rules with the aid of my fists," he went on. "It's more than possible Beaumont holds a grudge. I shouldn't put it past him to take out his ill feeling on you. He's a coward and a sneak and he has a nasty habit of…" He trailed off, frowning. "At any rate," he went on, his expression grim, "you're to have nothing to do with him."
It took her a moment to grasp the implications of the command, and in that moment the world seemed to grow marginally brighter and her heart a cautious degree lighter. She shifted sideways to scrutinize his glowering profile. "That sounds shockingly…protective."
"I paid for you," he said coldly. "You're mine. I look after what's mine. I shouldn't let Nick or Harry near him either."
"By gad— do you mean to say I am as important a possession as your cattle?" She pressed her hand to her heart. "Oh, Dain, you are too devastatingly romantic. I am altogether overcome."
He brought his full attention upon her for a moment, and his sullen gaze dropped to where her hand was. She hastily returned it to her lap.
Frowning, he turned back to the horses. "That overgarment thing, the what-you-call-it," he said testily.
"My pelisse? What's wrong with it?"
"You filled it better the last time I saw it," he said. "In Paris. When you burst into my party and bothered me." He steered the beasts right, into a tree-lined avenue a few yards south of the guard-house. "When you assaulted my virtue. Surely you remember. Or did it merely seem to fit better because you were wet?"
She remembered. More important, he did— in sufficient detail to notice a few pounds' shrinkage. Her mood lightened another several degrees.
"You could throw me into the Serpentine and find out," she said.
The short avenue led to a small, thickly shaded circular drive. The trees ringing it shut out the rest of the park. In a short while, the five o'clock promenade would begin, and this secluded area, like the rest of Hyde Park, would be crammed with London's fashionables. At present, however, it was deserted.
Dain drew the curricle to a halt and set the brake. "You two settle down," he warned the horses. "Make the least bother, and you'll find yourselves hauling barges in Yorkshire."
His tone, though low, carried the clear signal of Obedience or Death. The animals responded to it just as though they were human. Instantly they became the most subdued, docile pair of geldings Jessica had ever seen.
Dain turned his moody black gaze upon her. "Now, as to you, Miss Termagant Trent— "
"I love these pet names," she said, gazing soulfully up into his eyes. "Nitwit. Sapskull. Termagant. How they make my heart flutter!"
"Then you'll be in raptures with a few other names I have in mind," he said. "How can you be such an idiot? Or have you done it on purpose? Look at you!" He addressed this last to her bodice. "At this